Michelle Teheux: Living a more civilized life

Wednesday

Jul 28, 2010 at 12:01 AMJul 28, 2010 at 6:26 PM

Back in the day, we lived in small clans or tribes of loosely related people, usually ruled over by whoever had the strongest leadership skills, or the strongest arm. Everybody else grew, gathered or hunted food. About the only specialization in existence was perhaps the healer/spiritual leader. Other than the chief, most people were roughly equal in status.

Michelle Teheux

Back in the day, we lived in small clans or tribes of loosely related people, usually ruled over by whoever had the strongest leadership skills, or the strongest arm. Everybody else grew, gathered or hunted food. About the only specialization in existence was perhaps the healer/spiritual leader. Other than the chief, most people were roughly equal in status.

Then along came the ability to grow and store grain, and thus settle in one spot more or less permanently. We were civilized. That meant we had to have a few more rules for getting along, and it meant we could specialize a little more. Not everybody needed to work full time obtaining and storing food. With more people freed up from food duty, some would become soldiers. Or poets. Or the idle rich.

We’ve done nothing since then but become increasingly dependent on our ever-more-complex society. Most of us would starve if suddenly we could no longer walk into the grocery store and buy food.

We would also freeze to death, since most of us are utterly dependant upon the utility company. I live close enough to the Illinois River that I suppose I could bring a couple of buckets of nice, muddy green water to my house each day, but I doubt we’d survive long drinking that.

We are specialized to an astonishing degree. Many people do jobs that could not have been imagined a generation ago.

Time was, even the guy who made barrels still had a good understanding of the job of the guy who raised pigs. The guy who raised pigs had a decent idea of how the blacksmith made horseshoes.

Imagine asking a computer programmer, a modern farmer with a GPS-enabled tractor, an electrician, a web designer and a welder to step into each other’s jobs.

I have no earthly idea how a laptop computer is made or programmed, even though I am on one for 12 hours a day. We’re surrounded by more mysteries than ever.

And more rules. And more taxes.

Those rules and taxes may seem like a loss of freedom, but some of them are necessary, ultimately, to everyone else’s freedom.

This level of civilization we’ve decided to build up requires law enforcement to keep the order. If you want to compare the level of taxes people pay now with the tiny amount paid generations ago, you might want to reflect how many more government services we have now, many of them necessary only because of the increasing level of complexity in our society, and thus the increasing need to oversee all the things that hold the system together, from roads to meat inspection to public safety to the sort of safety net welfare programs that weren’t necessary earlier in history.

When folks could build a shelter in any likely spot out of the natural materials around them and live off the land, society didn’t need a welfare bureaucracy. But we’ve built a society that requires all the trappings of civilization now, whether people can afford to pay for them or not.

I’ve often thought some poor souls were just born in the wrong time. The guy who can’t keep a job today might have had status as a mighty hunter if he lived in ancient times. Meanwhile, the computer nerd who today enjoys every luxury his job skills can buy might not have fared too well if he had to depend on brute strength to bring down a bison.

I’m hopeful we can keep this whole civilization thing going, because while I do have more subsistence skills than many, I’m not eager to trade in editing a newspaper for plucking chickens and weaving cloth.

So let’s continue paying our taxes and supporting good law enforcement and basically living like civilized people. If you don’t like it, please go find a cave and enough land around it to live off the roots and berries and enjoy your “freedom.”

Michelle Teheux may be reached at mteheux@pekintimes.com.

The views expressed in this column are not necessarily those of the newspaper.